Understanding,” in Hermeneutics at the Crossroads , ed. Vanhoozer, Smith,
and Benson, [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006], 20). It is
troubling, however, that Vanhoozer refers to “meanings” and “intentions”
as if they were two different things.
- One of Westphal’s running jibes at Hirsch’s position is that the Hirschian
author (Westphal alleges) has a “godlike ability to produce a fi xed and fi nal
meaning” ( Whose Community? Which Interpretation? 81). The supposed
divinity of the Hirschian author is mentioned numerous times in Westphal’s
book—see there 58–60, 65–66, 81. In view of the foregoing argument
against the constructivist account of meaning, I submit that Westphal’s
own view of meaning actually imagines a more godlike author than does
anything that can be laid at Hirsch’s feet, for who could be more divine
than an author who creates something out of nothing?
Westphal’s identifi cation of the author as a “god,” which he unfairly makes to
look like a component of Hirsch’s position, appears to be derived (with
some modifi cation) from Roland Barthes. Barthes had written, “the author
is a god (his place of origin is the signifi ed); as for the critic, he is the priest
whose task is to decipher the Writing of the god” ( S/Z [New York: Hill and
Wang, 1974], 174). Barthes’s imagery, in turn, might be an echo of the
closing line of Heraclitus’s Homeric Problems : “We are all alike priests and
ministers of his divine poetry” (79.13 [trans. Donald A. Russell and David
Konstan, Heraclitus: Homeric Problems (SBL Writings from the Greco-
Roman World 14; Leiden: Brill, 2005), 131]).
- The term “interpretive gerrymandering” comes from a (rather hollow)
charge that Stephen Fowl throws at Hirsch (“The Ethics of Interpretation or
What’s Left Over After the Elimination of Meaning,” SBLSP 27 [1988]: 71).
- “The Stability of Meaning,” in Identity of the Literary Text , ed. Mario J. Valdés
and Owen Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 245.
- Francis Watson writes, “Writing ... does not just happen, nor does it sim-
ply exist without any relation to its origin. It would be as odd to character-
ize writing as the occurrence of certain shapes in more or less regular
patterns as it would be to characterize speech as the occurrence of certain
more or less regular patterns of sound” ( Text and Truth: Redefi ning
Biblical Theology [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997], 98).
- Peter Machamer and J.E. McGuire, Descartes’s Changing Mind (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2009), 141. Cf. also Charles Taylor,
“Ontology,” Philosophy 34 (1959): 125 (although there the illusion has to
do with ideational rather than purely mental givens).
THERE IS NOTHING OUTSIDE THE INTENTION: ADDRESSING “MEANING”... 81
